Mathias Jean Johansen

Make Preview Behave Like Vim

I spend many hours daily in Vim, and I’ve grown extremely fond of the way I can
easily navigate things with h, j, k, and
l. This have also led me to download and use the Vimium
plugin for Chrome quite extensively. The Vimium
plugin is so good that I rarely have to touch my Magic Trackpad anymore.

There is one problem, however. I tend to spend a fair amount of time reading
documents and books in the Preview.app on my Mac which by default does not allow
me to navigate whatever I am viewing with h, j,
k, and l, so I set out to find a workaround for this.

Here’s what you need to do:

Open “System Preferences”, go to “Keyboard” and then “Shortcuts”.

From there, you go to “Application Shortcuts”, and then you add two new
shortcuts both for Preview.app by clicking the + sign.

Since you cannot map j and k solely, I use
option+j and option+k instead as
my keyboard shortcuts. The commands for the shortcuts are “Down” and “Up”
respectively.